White Water

Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets. There is a port-hole of light at the end of the hemlock tunnel: birds cross it, flashing their voices at you, and you feel— from the way they tilt their heads and their throats swell— the beat of their brief song, another sign the world is what it is: a shade-tree heavy with households, its fruit for meat, its leaf for medicine. But that business of the first kiss is hard to fathom: knees quaking, white water over broken rock, and the coracle you trusted your life to in a bit of a spin, head swimming with the smell of flesh so close you feel it breathing, spilling secrets— its inmost name, for one, and what the near future feels like, time wobbling to a tribal thing without tenses, and that tenacious "I" a thing of the past, only a particle of the action now, nothing separate, a luminous tumult, an affair of air and palate, air and larynx, tongue, throat, teeth, whatever brings the words out in their summer dresses—and you can hear the crow's black scavenger guffawing, egg- and offal-scoffer, comedian of windspin, so all of a sudden you rush your kingdom-come, the two of you, insects shedding your dry, chitinous skins. And although what's left is raw for a while, the slightest breath burns it, in time it comes to become you, you can live into it, intoning the Sebastian koan— whose who in pain, who's who?— and know, or close-to-know, the here it is: two clean rooms in the next parish to wholeness.